PA-MIL: Phenotype-Aware Multiple Instance Learning Guided by Language Prompting and Genotype-to-Phenotype Relationships

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Hauptverfasser: Yang, Zekang, Liu, Hong, Wang, Xiangdong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Yang, Zekang
Liu, Hong
Wang, Xiangdong
author_facet Yang, Zekang
Liu, Hong
Wang, Xiangdong
contents Deep learning has been extensively researched in the analysis of pathology whole-slide images (WSIs). However, most existing methods are limited to providing prediction interpretability by locating the model's salient areas in a post-hoc manner, failing to offer more reliable and accountable explanations. In this work, we propose Phenotype-Aware Multiple Instance Learning (PA-MIL), a novel ante-hoc interpretable framework that identifies cancer-related phenotypes from WSIs and utilizes them for cancer subtyping. To facilitate PA-MIL in learning phenotype-aware features, we 1) construct a phenotype knowledge base containing cancer-related phenotypes and their associated genotypes. 2) utilize the morphological descriptions of phenotypes as language prompting to aggregate phenotype-related features. 3) devise the Genotype-to-Phenotype Neural Network (GP-NN) grounded in genotype-to-phenotype relationships, which provides multi-level guidance for PA-MIL. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that PA-MIL achieves competitive performance compared to existing MIL methods while offering improved interpretability. PA-MIL leverages phenotype saliency as evidence and, using a linear classifier, achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we thoroughly analyze the genotype-phenotype relationships, as well as cohort-level and case-level interpretability, demonstrating the reliability and accountability of PA-MIL.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02558
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PA-MIL: Phenotype-Aware Multiple Instance Learning Guided by Language Prompting and Genotype-to-Phenotype Relationships
Yang, Zekang
Liu, Hong
Wang, Xiangdong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Quantitative Methods
Deep learning has been extensively researched in the analysis of pathology whole-slide images (WSIs). However, most existing methods are limited to providing prediction interpretability by locating the model's salient areas in a post-hoc manner, failing to offer more reliable and accountable explanations. In this work, we propose Phenotype-Aware Multiple Instance Learning (PA-MIL), a novel ante-hoc interpretable framework that identifies cancer-related phenotypes from WSIs and utilizes them for cancer subtyping. To facilitate PA-MIL in learning phenotype-aware features, we 1) construct a phenotype knowledge base containing cancer-related phenotypes and their associated genotypes. 2) utilize the morphological descriptions of phenotypes as language prompting to aggregate phenotype-related features. 3) devise the Genotype-to-Phenotype Neural Network (GP-NN) grounded in genotype-to-phenotype relationships, which provides multi-level guidance for PA-MIL. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that PA-MIL achieves competitive performance compared to existing MIL methods while offering improved interpretability. PA-MIL leverages phenotype saliency as evidence and, using a linear classifier, achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we thoroughly analyze the genotype-phenotype relationships, as well as cohort-level and case-level interpretability, demonstrating the reliability and accountability of PA-MIL.
title PA-MIL: Phenotype-Aware Multiple Instance Learning Guided by Language Prompting and Genotype-to-Phenotype Relationships
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02558